He made a slit along the fish’s dorsal fin, then slid his fingers into the opening, feeling for the backbone. Intent on his work, he said, “Man, I wish Dad could have been there when I hooked this baby.”
She shifted her glance, afraid if she continued to watch, she’d caution him about cutting himself. “He’ll be sorry when he hears.”
“We didn’t catch shit—sorry, I mean squat—the last time we went out.” His sideways grin was quick, abashed.
And so endearing Lauren wanted to ruffle his hair, cup his cheek, but the moment felt so fragile to her—that sudden grin, his apparent ease rocketed her back to the days before the accident when they’d been close. She couldn’t bear it if he flinched.
A half hour later, Drew was upstairs, hopefully finishing his homework, when Kenzie came home. Hearing the car, Lauren left the laundry room, where she was folding clothes, and went out onto the porch. The girls climbed out of the backseat, and after they hugged, Amanda got into the front beside her mom. Suzanne waved and Lauren did, too, and their eyes connected, but the moment was brief and wary. Lauren ought to be used to it by now, the loss of Suzanne’s friendship, but every time their paths crossed, it cut her heart open. They’d shared so much, helped each other out so often; they’d laughed and cried and celebrated together . . . but what good was it, grieving for what was so clearly lost?
“Hi, Mommy.” Kenzie came up the steps, smiling. Her smile was beautiful, or it would be when the braces came off. Jeff was only half kidding every time he said by the time that happened, they’d have sunk enough money into Kenzie’s mouth that they should be able to slap four wheels on it and take it for a drive. The orthodontia was just one more huge expense on the list that was growing as quickly as the kids.
Lauren took Kenzie’s pink tote from her and slung it over her shoulder, smoothing her daughter’s silky dark hair back from her face. “Did you have fun? How was the ballet?”
“Sublime.” Kenzie’s second love, after ballet, was language. In school, vocabulary was a favorite subject. “I want to dance like that.”
“It’s hard work.” Lauren led the way into the house.
“I know. I have to want it more than anything else.” Kenzie repeated what Lauren had said so many times.
She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of Kenzie loving something that much. Passion was never easy; it wasn’t a joy every moment. She’d thought when Kenzie asked for ballet lessons in first grade, it was only because Amanda wanted them, but when Amanda quit to join the pep squad, Kenzie stayed with it. She attended classes three times a week now, and they had recently bought her first pair of toe shoes. Kenzie was over the moon.
“I went to Fishers’ and got pumpkins,” Lauren said.
“Really? For jack-o’-lanterns? Can we carve them now?”
Lauren smiled, all at once feeling light with gratitude that her headache was gone, the Oxy was gone, her children were home safe, a fish was filleted, and the laundry was done, all the small things. “Sure. Unless you have homework,” she answered Kenzie.
“No. I finished it Friday in study hall.”
“Put your things away, then, and tell your brother if he’s finished his homework to come and help if he wants to. We’ll take the pumpkins outside on the picnic table.”
Kenzie headed up the stairs and then paused. “Mom?” she asked, turning slowly around. “Is Daddy still mad at you?”
“I don’t think so.” Lauren was puzzled. “Why?”
“Because, you know, last week, when you didn’t charge enough for that job when Daddy took down the Anderson barn? He said you made him lose, like, a ton of money, and how was he supposed to make it up?”
Lauren’s heart sank. It was dumb, really dumb, but she’d so hoped Kenzie would forget about it, the ugly argument she’d witnessed, her mom and dad shouting at each other at the top of their lungs—worse than kids. Worse than any performance Kenzie and Drew put on when they got into it. It still rankled. It was true; they had lost several thousand on that job because of her mistake. She’d transposed the numbers on the contract, and no one caught it until the job was done and signed off on at an amount way below what it had cost to get the barn down. They’d been counting on the income, had needed it to make their month.
The day Jeff discovered the discrepancy, Lauren and Kenzie were just coming into the warehouse when he barreled out of his office, yelling something about Lauren screwing up, intimating that she must be back under the influence. It was a moment before she realized he was blaming her as if he wasn’t equally responsible. He’d taken the contract to be signed. He should have checked it over, seen her error. That was why it was called a partnership.
Almost instantly, she felt on fire, just lit up. She yelled back at him—things like if he was going to accuse her of being back on OxyContin every time she forgot something or made a mistake, why should she bother with recovery? Where was the end of his suspicion? When would he consider her debt paid and let her out of guilt jail? Poor Kenzie was flattened against the wall, dark eyes huge with alarm. Yelling was taboo in their family, like hitting and saying shut up. Lauren and Jeff pointed to themselves as examples. They didn’t do these things, therefore Drew and Kenzie shouldn’t, either.
But those rules only made sense when applied to the family they’d once been, before Lauren tumbled from the church bell tower, smashed her head and her pelvis, and plummeted down the OxyContin rabbit hole. She looked at Kenzie. “Your dad should have—” Lauren began, but then she stopped, biting down on the influx of her panic and aggravation. Kenzie didn’t need excuses. What she needed was reassurance. “He’s not mad anymore, okay? He said he was sorry, remember? It’s fine. Everything is fine.”
“You and Daddy are really stressed out.” Kenzie came down one step.
“Well, honey, things are kind of difficult right now, you know? But we’ll get through it, I promise.” Lauren smiled, holding Kenzie’s gaze, and when she came down the rest of the way and circled Lauren’s waist hard with her thin arms, Lauren pulled her close, bending her cheek to the top of Kenzie’s head, inhaling her sweetness, drawing it deeply into herself through the cold, bruised shade of her sorrow. Their embrace lasted only moments before Kenzie turned and flew up the steps, shouting for Drew, telling him something about whoever got into the backyard first got to carve the biggest pumpkin.
Lauren watched her daughter disappear into her room through a prism of tears. Sometimes she thought she couldn’t bear it, the weight of her daughter’s forgiveness and her love.
The moment Jeff got home, Drew brought out the bowl filled with fillets to show him. He launched into his fish story. Gabe and his dad hadn’t caught anything big enough to keep, he said. No one fishing at the lake that day hooked a fish as big. Jeff listened to Drew as if nothing else mattered. Watching them, Lauren wanted to shush Drew. She wanted to say Your father’s exhausted. She wanted to smooth her hand over Jeff’s brow, wipe away the dark smudges under his eyes. He looked so old and haggard, as if he’d aged overnight. Or had she not been paying attention? It jolted her somehow, how much she still seemed to miss, as if her mind were elsewhere without her permission.
“I tried to call you, Dad,” Drew said.
“Huh? What?” Jeff was admiring the fish. “How do you want to cook this bad boy?” he asked.
“Grill. We should definitely grill it, right?”
“I could sauté it,” Lauren said, thinking she would save Jeff the trouble of supervising Drew outside, but he said no.
“A bass that size has got to be grilled. Right, champ?”
Lauren passed Jeff a beer. “Are you okay?”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“It’s a mess at the farm, isn’t it? More work than you thought.”
“Yeah.”
A look crossed his face. Was it regret? Could he be like Tara? Were they both having second thoughts?
Lauren started to ask; she might have reopened the whole subject then, but he pinched the bridge of his nose, and when he looked at her again, when he said, “It’ll probably take a couple more weekends” and “I’ll have to figure out when,” something in his tone, like impatience or aggravation, some weariness—she didn’t know—stopped her, and she only nodded.
Jeff looked at the bottle of beer in his hand, drank some, gave her a quick glance. “Maybe when we go back, it should just be the two of us. Tara and Greg may not want to go. They weren’t that much help anyway.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“The money—you talked to Tara about her money, investing with Greg, and she didn’t take it well.”
“Something like that.”
“Greg knows?”
“Yeah, maybe. Guy’s a loser. I told Tara she needs to get away from him.”
She wouldn’t have taken that piece of advice well, either, Lauren thought, and Greg would be angry at her now, too. He’d suspect her of talking to Jeff about him.
They’d made another enemy.
Great.
After dinner, when the kids had gone upstairs, Lauren followed Jeff outside. They sat in adjacent chaise longues on the deck and looked at the moon, hanging like a fat, misshapen pearl in the dark throat of the sky, and Lauren again considered it, taking up the whole thorny matter of selling the farm. But then Jeff took her hand, and reveling in his touch, she didn’t want the moment spoiled if she was wrong in assuming he might be softening, yielding to her way of thinking that the farm shouldn’t be allowed to pass out of their family.
They would find another way.
File bankruptcy, if Jeff could stand the blow to his pride. It might allow them to keep this house, possibly even protect the business and the farm somehow, too. Maybe that was a lot to hope for.
But they could look into it. They had options, Lauren thought.
Even Jeff might have thought of a plan. That could be the reason for opening the account at Cornerstone Bank. She turned to him to ask about it, holding the question in her mouth. But the night was so lovely and quiet, and his grasp was so warm. He was always warm, and she loved that about him, and later, in bed, when he pulled her into his embrace, she welcomed the heat of his kisses, the touch of his fingertips as he teased a path from the hollow of her neck, to her breast and lower, to outline the curve of her hip. She looked into his eyes when he entered her, and she wondered if it was a trick of the light or were they shining from tears?
“Jeff?” she whispered, touching his face, encountering the damp evidence.
He paused, locking her gaze, and it was only for a moment, but his expression seemed so intense, so desperate and filled with longing, that she pulled him to her, pulled him more deeply inside her, giving herself to him. Providing him with shelter. Because sometimes, that was all you could offer, and after the way he had sheltered her, it was the least she could do.
The next morning, they were in the bathroom, in the midst of their usual routine, and she felt normal and ordinary and rejoiced in it. Something had shifted between them last night; in their lovemaking, she and Jeff had rounded some awful corner. He had cried! The thought blazed in her mind. She was filled with hope. They would be all right. She glanced sidelong at him. “This will sound crazy.”
“What?”
“I don’t remember opening an account at Cornerstone Bank.”
“We were there last month. We talked to Paul Thibideaux, my buddy from Dallas? He’s the VP.”
Lauren saw her own hope mirrored in Jeff’s eyes, that any minute now, the details he was feeding her would raise the memory from the dead zone in her mind. She shook her head, touched her brow.
“You signed the papers,” he said. His tenderness, if there was any left from last night, was tinged with a degree of impatience.
She turned to lean against the vanity countertop, saying she’d seen them. “On the desk in the study.”
Jeff spit toothpaste into the sink. He rinsed his mouth, wiped his face with a towel. “You were sick of Diane sticking her nose into everything we do. We both were.”
Lauren made a face. Diane Taggert was a teller at First State, where she and Jeff had banked for years. She was also a neighbor and nosy, just as Jeff said. How are you, dear? She’d ask every time she saw Lauren, and it wasn’t out of genuine caring. The question and the stare that accompanied it were more pointed, like daggers. Are you still sober? That’s what Diane really wanted to know. Taking care of your poor kids? Walking the straight and narrow? Lauren thought Diane felt entitled to meddle. She’d earned the right, given all she’d done for the Wilders in the wake of the accident—organizing an entire team of neighbors who, through the long weeks of Lauren’s hospital stay made sure the refrigerator was stocked with groceries, the house was cleaned, and the kids were ferried to ballet lessons and football practice. None of their neighbors in those early weeks had seemed able to do enough, but that changed. People didn’t bring casseroles to the family of a dope fiend.
“It’s a relief, right?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know. I guess. It’s just—”
“What?” He bent his head, wanting her gaze.
She thought of the Oxy she’d found, that he might know about it and be waiting in vain for her confession. She was failing him again. Failing to be honest, to show courage. Tell him, she ordered herself. But she couldn’t; she was too afraid of losing him and her children, not to mention her mind.
“It’s nothing.” She went into her closet to escape his scrutiny. If only there were someone she could talk to. Someone safe.
But there wasn’t. Not since Margaret died.
6
Bo was wearing red earmuffs the day Annie met him for the first time, and Batman pajama bottoms with a green T-shirt turned wrong side out. He was six and she was ten, and she’d been dragged to McDonald’s by her mother to have dinner with Bo and his dad. Annie’s mom said she and Bo’s dad, JT, were friends, but Annie was no dummy. She knew JT was more than a friend. She saw them kiss. She saw how her mom smiled at JT and at Bo, all moon-eyed and sugary, and it infuriated her. She got madder still, on that summer evening at McDonald’s, when her mom took her off to one side and whispered to stop the pouting and be nice. “Bo’s been through a lot.”
She jiggled Annie’s elbow. “A lot,” she repeated with emphasis.
Annie wondered what a lot meant but not enough to ask. Under duress, she took Bo out to the play area with the big colored tubes you could slide around in, even though she was too old to go there.
“C’mon,” she said when he hung back, “and take off those stupid earmuffs.”
“They help me,” he told her gravely.
“How? It’s a hundred degrees outside. You look like a moron.”
“When I have them on, the noise goes away, and I can hear my mommy singing.”
Annie frowned.
“She’s in heaven. She’s an angel.”
“She’s dead?” Annie couldn’t imagine it, not having her mama.
He nodded, still solemn, and Annie’s heart melted.
“My dog died,” she said. “She was old, but I had her since I was two.”
“What was her name?” Bo asked.
“Cassie,” Annie said. “I still miss her.”
Bo took off his earmuffs and held them out to Annie. “You can wear these, and maybe you’ll hear her the way I hear my mom.”
He let the earmuffs be packed away a year later, after JT and Annie’s mom got married, when they became a family. Annie put stuff away, too, the way kids do—her dolls and the squishy blue doggie her mom had made for her out of an old towel when she was a baby. She didn’t think about Bo’s earmuffs again until her mother was killed in the car accident. Annie guessed Bo went into the attic and got them, because he’d been wearing th
em the day after the funeral when he’d found her outside on the back steps crying. Sitting beside her, he took them off and pulled them over her ears. He circled her shoulders with his arm and held on to her, and she leaned against him, finding comfort in his presence. He was her brother, and she loved him even when he acted crazy.
Even when he walked for miles on end like someone possessed. There were other indications, too, that his brain was wonky, periods of time when he talked too fast or not at all. Times when he forgot to eat or bathe or sleep. He couldn’t concentrate. But then, a patch of days or even weeks would pass and he’d behave almost normally, almost like his old sweet, quirky self. We’re all oddballs. Annie’s mom had said that. But while she was alive, she never stopped searching for answers, for ways to help Bo. He was tested and scanned, counseled and medicated. Labels were tossed around like confetti, but the general consensus was that he suffered from schizoaffective disorder topped with bipolar and autistic tendencies—and earmuffs. That was the one constant with Bo. He wore his earmuffs, religiously.
Red ones—always red—worn so frequently that Annie got to the place where she thought she might not recognize him without them, and that was why, on Sunday evening, when she found them discarded on his bed at JT’s, it scared her.
She’d been worried since Friday when she was at Fishers’ with Cooper and he said he’d seen Bo get into a car earlier that day, a Lincoln Town Car, driven by a woman. What woman? Annie had asked Cooper, but of course, he didn’t know. Why would he?
Annie scooped Bo’s earmuffs off his bed, thinking two things: One, he never rode with strangers. And two, he always wore his earmuffs.
She brought them into the den, where JT was watching football on ESPN, and held them up. “He left these here. Did you know?” She lifted her voice over the sound of the game announcer.
Crooked Little Lies Page 7
